Scholars have long identified Ludovico Ariosto's famous tale of
Ariodante and Ginevra as the primary source for Edmund Spenser's
Phedon-Claribell episode in book 2 of The Faerie Queene.
They also typically cite Spenser's and Ariosto's versions of the
story among probable subtexts for the Hero-Claudio plot in William
Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing. Recently, Much
Ado's concern with the violence underpinning chivalric romance
ideals, on the one hand, and the affinity between its
representations of theatrical practice and those found in
contemporary attacks against the stage, on the other, have been
noted by John Traugott and Jean Howard respectively. This article,
too, will discuss Shakespeare's comedy together with epic-romance
and antitheatrical rhetoric. In so doing, however, it will examine
not only the familiar motif of a beautiful woman falsely exposed as
a whore but another juxtaposed with it in both Ariosto and Spenser
and appropriated, in turn, by English antitheatricalists: the
beautiful enchantress exposed as a whorish hag.

The enchantress herself has a long literary history, one in
which erotic pleasures and dangers frequently stand, in part, for
the pleasures and dangers of representation itself. Plutarch is
perhaps the first explicitly to employ the analogy between a
romance hero confronting a temptress's wiles and a reader facing
literary seductions. His "How the Young Man Should Study Poetry"
admits Plato's charge (in the Republic ) that even
allegorical poetry may corrupt young men: "'Bad may be found in the
head of the cuttle-fish; good there is also,' because it is very
pleasant to eat but it makes one's sleep full of bad dreams and
subject to strange and disturbing fancies, as they say. Similarly
in the art of poetry there is much that is pleasant and nourishing
for the mind of a youth, but quite as much that is disturbing and
misleading, unless in the hearing of it he have proper oversight."
Plutarch nonetheless goes on to defend poetry's role in education.
Central to his argument is the example of Odysseus tied to the mast
while listening to the Sirens' song. "Shall we then stop the ears
of the young," Plutarch asks, "as those of the Ithacans were
stopped, with a hard and unyielding wax, and force them to put to
sea in the Epicurean boat, and avoid poetry and steer their course
clear of it; or rather shall we set them against some upright
standard of reason and there bind them fast, guiding and guarding
their judgement, that it may not be carried away from the course by
pleasure towards what will do them hurt?" Rather than stopping
their ears to poetry in the manner of Odysseus' lesser companions,
young men ought to bind themselves to the mast of reason and "use
poetry as an introductory exercise in philosophy, by training
themselves habitually to seek the profitable in what gives
pleasure, and to seek satisfaction therein." Such Odyssean right
readers will "seek what is useful and salutary" in pleasing
fictions and discard the rest. For Christian humanists, following
Plutarch, the Ulysses-Siren myth proved equally germane to the
defense of imaginative literature. Clement of Alexandria, for
example, takes the hero's encounter with the Sirens as an emblem of
how to use rather than reject pagan literature by reading it
allegorically: "most of those who subscribe to the name of
Christian are like the companions of Odysseus . . . It is not so
much the Sirens that they sail past and put behind them as the
rhythms and melodies (of the genius of Greece) . . . They stop
their ears by their rejection of learning . . . Yet he who seeks to
choose what is serviceable . . . should in no wise turn aside from
the love of wisdom . . . like a beast without reason . . . All that
we must guard against is that we should dally there and go no
further instead of returning home again to the true philosophy."
Such allusions to Ulysses' interactions with Circe and the Sirens
proliferate in Renaissance apologies for poetry by writers such as
Giovanni Boccaccio, Torquato Tasso, Arthur Golding, and Philip
Sidney. In an important strand...

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